


The Truth About the Rain

by galacticproportions



Series: Veterans' Affairs [10]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, True Love, Widowhood, bereavement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-01-30 01:50:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12643692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: This was built into it, always, from the very beginning.The last days of a long love.





	The Truth About the Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HelloMrOperator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloMrOperator/gifts), [Klyaksa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Klyaksa/gifts).



> This is sad. 
> 
> It's for HelloMrOperator and Klyaksa, whose comments on this series have always been generative, generous, and thoughtful.

_The beauty of the rain is how it falls._

 

*

 

On Yavin 4, the living wash the bodies of their beloved dead, and wrap them in a clean sheet, and prepare them for the fire. They gather the ashes and bury them at the root of a tree, or dig them into a garden.

No one knows what Finn's people do. No one knows who they are, or were. Unlike many former stormtroopers, he never went looking, never did the gene scans or the pilgrimages. In the sense that he was their representative in the Parliament of Galactic Worlds, ex-'troopers _were_ his people, but he never used the options he worked so hard to get for them.

In another sense, his people were there, in their right place. Rey lifted Finn's body gently, touching it only with her mind, and Poe arranged his limbs and wrapped the sheet around him.

“Did you feel him go?” he asked her, because he wanted to be cruel and wanted not to be alone, because he knew that it had hurt her just as much to feel it as it had hurt for him not to be there. To come home. To see Finn sitting there, a little sideways, against the arm of the couch. To know then.

“I felt him,” she said.

On Jakku, the dead were rendered down for protein and water.

 

*

 

He knows that despite the strains and limitations of old age, despite the worry that Poe was to him (what's the _point_ of being older and frailer if you can't even die first), Finn enjoyed his life, their life together, watering the plants, talking with their neighbors, holding each other in the dark.

He knows that Finn was proud of his life, the shape of it, the choices he'd made as soon as he knew he could make them. Fugitive, rebel, operative, administrator, champion. Friend and lover. Free man.

He knows that Finn knew he was loved, because Poe told him in words and in actions and with his whole body, if not every day, then an overwhelming percentage of their days since they first met, and extra for all the days they missed.

He knows that Finn died happy, and fulfilled, and loved, after a life much longer and richer than he ever expected to have.

It doesn't help.

 

*

 

The ceremony's over: the speeches from Finn's aides and apprentices over the years, Almaz and Tuve and Molly and Sterrebren, and from Notta, the Stormtrooper Jedi who knew Finn in his first postwar work and now never leaves Rey's side, and from Rey herself, straightbacked and misleadingly fragile of appearance, still with plenty of color in her hair and face. Jedi live a long time. Almaz, gray herself now, had asked if Poe wanted to say something. He did not. He dug down and dragged up a trace of his old manner to send her away with some degree of gentleness.

Walking home, BB-8 rolls ahead of him in a shallow arc, mapping the edges of the part of the world Poe can't see: the slice out of his vision after a stroke. It's this world's summer, hot and dry, and Finn's little courtyard garden is looking parched, especially since Poe hasn't taken the trouble to water it the past few days.

The apartment when he enters it is cool and dim, the day-blinds drawn. He wants to crumple to the floor, but a trace of practicality stops him; his knees won't let him get up again if he does that, and BB's too round to help. Plenty of people have offered company, but he's refused all of it. Their Yavinese neighbors have been bringing him dishes of food on the daily since Finn died, and he's been putting them in the conservator and eating bits of them when BB-8 scolds him or, at one point, tazed him.

Poe sits on the couch at the _other_ end, the one closer to the door.

“I can help you sleep,” Rey had said, when they were parting. “I can send you sleep, if you want. Tell me what time of night.” He'd thanked her, said he'd be all right. She'd looked at him scornfully, held him hard, then walked away.

He sits while day turns into evening turns into night.

BB-8 rocks in his field of view, their diodes glowing in the now-dark room. “You can power down if you want, Beeb,” Poe says. “It's okay. I know you miss him too.”

BB-8 was a combat astromech in a grossly uneven war. They've known about organic death and droid destruction since the day they first powered up. They've mourned. But there'd been such a long stretch when nobody was dying. The General died, and Kes, within a week of each other, and Poe had gone home to wash his father's body. But after that, nobody for a long while.

The droid makes the sequences of noises that mean Poe has a message waiting for him. Poe shakes his head. He no longer travels much, but he has a couple of holocalls scheduled, one with a group of Ostrobyoi who want to start a school, one he can't remember right now. He'd asked BB-8 to forward a postponement until further notice. Work might do him good, but he doesn't want good done to him right now. BB-8 adds, “The message is from Finn.”

“ _What.”_

“Recorded seventeen standard years after the Galactic Accords,” the droid adds primly.

With the part of his brain that's still working, Poe does the math. That's a few years ago now. Finn was still serving in Parliament then, and Poe was at the height of his activity as a--“facilitator,” they used to call it, chuckling not for any reason, not because it was actually funny, not even because sometimes what he was facilitating was a rescue home for injured pittins and sometimes a coup, but just because. He was probably away when the message was recorded. They'd been apart a lot, over the years. “Play it,” he says.

BB-8 hesitates, rolls back. “The message is visual.”

That makes Poe hesitate, too. But delicacy from a droid is a little much right now, and it's going to feel equally bad to see and to not see. “Just play it, please.”

BB-8 makes the noise that passes with them for a sigh, whirs a little, and projects the holo.

And there Finn is, about as tall as Poe's forearm from fingertip to elbow and glowing blue, his back straight and his head shaved, dressed in his Parliamentary sash of office. “Hi, Poe,” he says, and Poe is grateful beyond measure for the relative tinniness of BB-8's speakers, grateful that not by any stretch of the imagination could Finn be back here, in their apartment, talking to him.

“I'm about to leave for sessions,” Finn's voice says, “and...I don't know. I have a bad feeling about this one. I don't know how to pin it down, not enough to do anything about it, it's just a feeling. That I might not make it back. And you're on Little Marrac--” Poe remembers that job, it was one of the ones that didn't pan out--“so I wanted to leave you this, in case.

“You know I love you, I know you know that, because I told you just before you left, and I tell you all the time anyway.” This is so much like his own thought from earlier that Poe experiences a sensation almost like a hyperspace jump, like time collapsing. “And you know I want you,” holo-Finn is going on, “because I showed you, also just before you left, and if I'm wrong about this and I make it back I'll show you again. And you know I—admire you, I guess, even though that seems like a weird way to say it. I'm impressed with you? Anyway, I'm glad you're on Little Marrac right now, doing what you do.”

Poe doesn't move. Feels held in stasis, except for the tears that are flowing down his face, from his bad eye and from his good eye.

“But I don't know if you know this, this thing that I'm about to say. Ever since we met, you've trusted me. Not just with your life, but with _myself._ To choose who I am and what I want to do, even if it was, I don't know, a mistake, or off-track, or dangerous, or just inconvenient for you. Even when we were fighting, that time”--Poe remembers that time, feels nauseated by every second he wasted by being unreasonable and stubborn—“even when you wanted me to do something different, even when we disagreed about what was right, I was still a person who could make a choice, to you.

“You know about where I come from, about as much as anybody can who didn't go through it. How I started, what I was. But you didn't know me then, how it was to to be that, to _be_ on someone else's terms. Everything I was, everything about me, was someone else's idea, what someone else wanted, and anyway, the thing that I wanted you to know if I die is, the part of my life I lived on my own terms, I lived with you.”

The little blue figure clears its throat, a scratch in the audio pickup. “If I'm wrong, and I come back, that'll still be true,” Finn says—said, years ago. “I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'll see you soon. Okay, BB, thanks, that's it.”

But he did come back. Poe's remembering it perfectly: that was the session that Finn survived the second assassination attempt, this time by someone from a kidnap town. He remembers talking about it when they were both at home again, after Poe had seen the news on interplanetary media and fought his impulses until it became eminently clear that the mediation process on Little Marrac wasn't going to lead anywhere this solar year, after he'd come home and taken Finn in his arms and dropped to his knees right there in the doorway while BB-8 made long-suffering noises and retreated to their charging station. After Poe had fixed dinner and they'd gone to bed and made it last this time. That time.

They'd talked about how strange it was, for someone whose child had been kidnapped for a stormtrooper—by other stormtroopers, true—to want revenge on Finn, of all people. “You'd be advocating for her kid, too,” Poe remembers saying. “If they were still alive.”

“It's not as simple as that. I mean, it can't be, or she wouldn't have done it. She hates what they became, I guess. I think I can understand that. Even though she's wrong.”

“I'm glad she missed, anyway,” Poe said, and Finn snorted and said, “Yeah, no shit,” and rolled on top of him for round three, which lasted until almost dawn, even though they weren't young then--that day, that night, that day. Poe closes his eyes, swamped in it, a sense-memory that overtakes his whole body like the concussion wave from a ship blowing behind him. He wonders if Finn forgot to delete the message or just left it, figuring it was bound to come in handy some day. And then the sobs start up again, shaking him like a coughing fit, like muscle spasms coming out of low-quality bacta, like being tortured, like his world ending.

Poe cries until he's dry-heaving, until his body starts to soothe itself for survival's sake. He doesn't want it to. He wants to fall to pieces. But he doesn't. The couch presses against his calves, and BB-8's replacement carapace against his shins, and his hands into the sockets of his eyes.

He thinks, _This was built into it, always, from the very beginning._

He thinks, _I'm not gonna be sorry I loved him. I'm not sorry._ The tears start up again, a choking wave, subside.

BB-8 suggests in a subdued burble, “Maybe you should try to power down.” They know what sleeping is, too, but sometimes they still talk as though they didn't. Poe would tell himself to sleep, too, if he were someone else. He would tell someone else to—oh, the hell with it. Eventually he'll do something besides sit here, whether it's sleep, or eat, or answer the call from the Ostrobyoi, or water Finn's damn plants in the courtyard. And maybe he'll live long enough to be comforted by Finn's message, and maybe he won't. Something fiercer than comfort, something about risk, the right thing, the right choice, is burning at the core of him.

_I'm not sorry. I'm glad._

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've known for a while that I wanted to round out the Veterans' Affairs series this way. I expect to continue writing and loving these characters for a long time, and I'm hoping the new movie will give me new stories to tell, either with it or against it, so I thought it would be a good time to end this one, the way that things do end.


End file.
